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Btb (wip)

This is just the background for a piece that I'm still working on. I wanted to try something more dynamic, so everthing is tilted at an angle to accentuate some action that will be happening in the foreground.

My workflow:

I started this background working from back to front. Starting with the sky, I filled the layer with the flat material using a light blue color.

Then I created a crescent-shaped alpha and used that along with the spray stroke to create the clouds. After that, I positioned a gradient alpha using the Depth Brush (since I can tilt the depth brush freely).

I created the mountains in the background using Pixolator's AlphaCentury technique. I used a high colorized ambient material to simulate the haze.

For the grassy area, first I used the full-sized square alpha and raised the noise value and then masked a plane with that alpha to and used offset, to create some subtle hills and valleys in the grassy area. After placing the plane on the canvas I painted over it using the grass texture from the texture alpha and applied the clumpy fiber material to it (the one that's found in the ZMaterials folder). I raided the perspective slider in the fiber material up a bit so the grass would get smaller in the distance.

The wooden fence is made up of low-resolution cubes that I multi-marked together. The wood texture was done by using the Speckle alpha and painting a darker color of the base wood color and applying a colorbump value in the material. The stump was made from a truncated cone and then edite.

The clothespins were made from adaptive skinned zspheres and the linens were made from the terrain3d tool with noise applied on one axis. I used a high ambient material on the linens to make them look more natural, since thin cloth tends to be illuminated from both sides.

Eventually, there will be something sitting on the tree stump (sort of).

Any helpful feedback and crits welcome.

Last edited by WingedOne; 03-03-06 at 05:59 AM.

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Thats a great start. The only thing i see is the color of the stump, its a bit lifeless. I think it would work great if you use the same color (and saturation) as you used for the fence and spins.
Great job, im curious to see more

This looks great to me. I like the lightning, the color combination is really great! And i really love the way how the fiber-mat-based vegetation turns out! I need to experiment asap with the way you achieved that The linen-material looks good, also the beautiful sky.
I have also some points that I would work on, if you don´t mind...
-the top of the stump could need a little bit more perspective, related to the ground
-maybe the linen pieces would look more natural if you deform them by hand with a big sized brush. I think the folding looks more natural if it hangs more lose and with less vertical folds.
Maybe a bit like here:
-perhabs the fence could cast more/longer shadow according to the almost-sunrise/set
and
- the stone at the horizon near the mountains in the bg on the left side might be a bit irritating, its hard to decide if it belongs to bg or fg

I hope it was constructive and not too much crtic but I think that are things that dont need too much effort to change and that doesnt change the great character your image already has.